Part 1 (2/2)

With all this there remains a large margin which cannot be generally set down as certain, and which even in matters essential must be written tentatively, with such phrases as ”it would seem,” or ”probably” to excuse it. But history is consoled by the reflection that all these gaps may be filled by further research or further discovery, and that each new effort of scholars.h.i.+p bridges one and then another.

As to the critical power by which each individual writer will decide between conflicting statements, or apparently irreconcilable conditions, this must be left to his own power of discrimination and to the reader's estimate of his ability to weigh evidence. He is in duty bound--as I have attempted to do very briefly in certain notes--to give the grounds of his decision, and, having done so, he admits his reader to be a judge over himself: with this warning, however, that historical judgment is based upon a vast acc.u.mulation of detail acquired in many fields besides those particularly under consideration, and that a competent historian generally claims an authority in his decisions superior to that reposing upon no more than a mere view of limited contemporary materials.

I

THE POLITICAL CIRc.u.mSTANCES

The Battle of Crecy was the first important decisive action of what is called ”The Hundred Years' War.” This war figures in many history books as a continued struggle between two organised nations, ”England” and ”France.” To present it in its true historical character it must be stated in far different terms.

The Hundred Years' War consisted in two groups of fighting widely distant in time and only connected by the fact that from first to last a Plantagenet king of England claimed the Crown of France against a Valois cousin. Of these two groups of fighting the first was conducted by Edward III., and covers about twenty years of his reign. It was magnificently successful in the field, and gave to the English story the names of _Crecy_ and of _Poitiers_. So far as the main ostensible purpose of that first fighting was concerned, it was unsuccessful, for it did not result in placing Edward III. upon the French throne.

The second group of actions came fifty years later, and is remembered by the great name of _Agincourt_.

This latter part of the Hundred Years' War was conducted by Henry V., the great-grandson of Edward III. and the son of the Lancastrian usurper. And Henry was successful, not only in the tactical results of his battles, but in obtaining the Crown of France for his house. After his death his success crumbled away; and a generation or so after Agincourt, rather more than one hundred years after the beginning of this long series of fights, the power of the kings of England upon the Continent had disappeared. As a visible result of all their efforts, nothing remained but the important bastion of Calais, the capture of which was among the earliest results of their invasions.

When we say that the ostensible object of all this conflict from first to last was the establishment of the Plantagenet kings of England as kings of France in the place of their cousins the Valois, we must remember what was meant by those terms in the fourteenth century, when Edward first engaged in the duel. There was no conception of the conquest of a _foreign_ power such as would lie in the mind of a statesman of to-day. Society was still feudal. Allegiance lay from a man to his lord, not from a man to his central political government. Not only the religion, the thoughts, and the daily conduct of either party to the war were the same, but in the governing society of both camps the language and the very blood were the same. Edward was a Plantagenet. That is, his family tradition was that of one of the great French feudal n.o.bles. It was little more than one hundred years before that his great-grandfather had been the actual and ruling Lord of Normandy, and of France to the west and the south-west, for the first Plantagenet, had though holding of the Crown at Paris, been the active monarch of Aquitaine, of Brittany, of Anjou, Normandy, and Maine.

So much for the general sentiment under which the war was engaged. As to its particular excuse, this was slight and hardly tenable, and we may doubt whether Edward intended to press it seriously. He engaged in the war from that spirit of chivalric adventure (a little unreal, but informed by an indubitable taste for arms) which was the mark of the fourteenth century, and which was at the same time a decline from the sincere knightly spirit of the thirteenth.

The excuse given was this. The French monarchy had descended, from its foundation in 987 right down to the death of Charles IV. in 1328, directly from father to son, but in that year, 1328, male issue failed the direct line. The obviously rightful claimant to the throne, according to the ideas of those times--and particularly of Northern France--was Philip of Valois, the first cousin of the king, Charles IV., who had just died.

Charles IV. had been the son of King Philip IV., and Philip of Valois was the son of Charles of Valois, Philip IV.'s brother. Philip of Valois was therefore the eldest in unbroken male descent of the house.

It might be claimed (and it was claimed by Edward III.) that the daughters of elder brothers and their issue should count before the sons of younger brothers. Now there were two female heiresses or their issue present as against Philip of Valois. Charles IV., the king just dead, had a sister Isabella, and Isabella was the mother of Edward III. of England.

But an elder brother to Charles IV., namely, Louis X., had himself left a daughter, who was now the Queen of Navarre.

If this principle that the daughter or the issue of the daughter of an elder brother should count before the male issue of a younger brother had been granted in its entirety, Edward would have had no claim, because this elder brother of Charles IV., Louis X., had had issue--that daughter, Joan, the wife of the King of Navarre. So Edward qualified this first general principle, that one could inherit through women, by another principle, to wit, that, though the _claim_ to the throne should proceed through the _daughters_ of _elder_ brothers rather than through the _sons_ of _younger_ ones, yet the _throne_ could _itself_ only actually be held by a male!

By this tortuous combination Edward III. advanced his claim. His mother had been the grand-daughter of Philip III. of France, and he was a male.

Her father was the elder brother of Philip of Valois' father, so he claimed before Philip of Valois.

The whole scheme is apparent from the following table:--

Philip III. 1270-1285.

| | ---------------------------------------------- | | Philip IV. 1285-1314 Charles of Valois | | ------------------------------------- | | | | | | Louis X. Philip V. Charles IV. Isabella=Edward II. Philip VI.

1314-1316 1316-1322 1322-1328 | 1328-1350 | | (_Crecy_) | || | Edward III. | Joan=King of Navarre | John Edward the Black 1350-1364 Prince. (_Poitiers_).

But, I repeat, we must not take Edward's political claim too seriously.

His real object was not so much to establish himself upon the throne of France and to create a great French-speaking united monarchy of French and British under the single rule of the Plantagenets, as to try a great adventure and to see what would come of it.

It was this that gave to Edward's wars the character not of campaigns with a fixed object, but GREAT RAIDS, the very successes of which were unexpected and only half fruitful. It was this, again, which made him so uncertain and vacillating as to how he should use those successes when they came; which made him suggest now this, now that basis for peace after each victory, but never to insist very particularly, however surprising and thorough his work in the field, upon the French throne.

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